The trials resulted in the execution of hundreds of people of all ages, sexes and classes, all of whom were burned at the stake, sometimes after having been beheaded, sometimes alive. The witch trials took place during the ongoing religious Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics, in an area on the religious border between Catholic and Protestant territories, and were conducted by a Catholic Prince Bishop intent on introducing the Counter-Reformation in his territory.
They started in the territory around the city in and evaporated in As so often with the mass trials of sorcery, the victims soon counted people from all society, including nobles, councilmen and mayors. In the s, with the destruction of Protestantism in Bohemia and the Electorate of the Palatinate , the Catholic reconquest of Germany was resumed.
In , with the Edict of Restitution , its basis seemed complete. Those same years saw, in central Europe at least, the worst of all witch-persecutions, the climax of the European craze. Many of the witch-trials of the s multiplied with the Catholic reconquest. In some areas the lord or bishop was the instigator, in others the Jesuits. Sometimes local witch-committees were set up to further the work. The years β29 were dreadful years in Baden, recently reconquered for Catholicism by Tilly: there were 70 victims in Ortenau, 79 in Offenburg.
At Reichertshofen , in the district of Neuburg an der Donau , 50 were executed between November and August In the three prince-archbishoprics of the Rhineland the fires were also relit.
In Mainz , too, the burnings were renewed. At Cologne the City Fathers had always been merciful, much to the annoyance of the prince-archbishop, but in he was able to put pressure on the city and it gave in. Naturally enough, the persecution raged most violently in Bonn , his own capital. There, the chancellor and his wife, and the archbishop's secretary's wife, were executed; children of three and four years were accused of having devils for their paramours, and students and small boys of noble birth were sent to the bonfire.
